Message content access will soon require special privileges

[Kardbord]

Summary

Discord has announced that as of April 2022, message content access will be restricted as a special privileged intent for verified bots.

Impact

Obviously this bot is not currently verified, and I can't imagine it will ever be included in enough servers that Discord will require it to become verified. That said, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth to rely on deprecated functionality. In the event that Discord decided to fully sunset unprivileged message content access, this bot would be almost completely unusable barring a major rewrite.

Some functionality (and proposed functionality) of this bot requires message content access.

• Responding to user greetings and goodbyes.
  • There are a few exceptions to this, such as explicit bot-mentions and DMs; these will still work.
• The ability to mock certain questions or phrases.
• Configurable word substitution.

Additionally, the dgc library (one of this project's dependencies) relies on message content access to check for the command prefix and dispatch commands.

Way Forward

Luckily the maintainers of discordgo seem to have been hard at work implementing Slash Commands support, which allows for bot commands without requiring access to message content. This does not help in the case of the Kard-bot features listed above, but it at least gets explicit bot commands out of the woods.

Also bear in mind that bots have access to message content in DMs and in any messages where the bot is explicitly mentioned.

Ultimately, the following actions should be taken:

1. Remove the dgc dependency and migrate to discordgo slash commands.
2. Try to implement new features in such a way that message content access is either not required or is obtained via an approved method, such as a bot-mention or DM.
3. Try not to stress too hard about the features that absolutely require message content access. 😅 Discord has stated that unverified bots will retain the deprecated message content access functionality. It seems highly unlikely that this bot will be required to be verified.
   

Additional Reading

• Thoughts from the maintainer of discordpy
• r/programming thread

[Kardbord]

The dgc dependency has been removed and commands have been migrated to use the new Slash Commands API. However, some bot functionality still relies on message content access.

• Responding to user greetings and goodbyes.
  • There are a few exceptions to this, such as explicit bot-mentions and DMs; these will still work.
• The ability to mock certain questions or phrases.
• Configurable word substitution.

As stated above, try to work around requiring message content access as much as possible going forward, and try not to sweat the functionality that absolutely requires it.

And with that, the sun sets on this massive novel to myself. 😄